A psychologist and educators' collection of stories on 60 years of practice with children, teachers, administrators, and parents. Principles of brain research and cognitive psychology underlie implications for practice.

Tag: Psychology

I wish I could say I had always wanted to be a Psychologist. But in fact it wasn’t until I got to college and took a ‘Psych’ course by accident (It was the only elective which would fit in my schedule.) that I discovered Psychology. So I switched majors. Even then I had no idea what kind of Psychology I wanted to go into. It wasn’t until I was graduating from college and trying to figure out ‘now what?’ that a friend who also was not sure what he wanted to do called me up and said “Let’s be teachers.” “What?” I replied.

At the time the city of New York, where I was going to college, was desperate for teachers in the inner city areas. To fill their open positions, they placed ads in the newspapers. I had no, that’s zero, education courses or training. But the city was willing to accept my Psychology, and probably a bunch of other classes in lieu of Education credits. All I had to do was pass the exams (two parts: written and oral). The results said I passed by one point. Really? Maybe I did. Maybe I was a good guesser. Maybe Attila the Hun would have passed if he had taken the test.

So I found my self certified to teach K-6 in New York City and in an elementary school in the South Bronx not too far from where ‘Fort Apache, The Bronx’ with Paul Newman was filmed in 1981. (Google it.)

Excited, I arrived in September with the notion that all people living in poverty needed was some well intended white middle class kid like me to show them how to get out of poverty by cleaning up their neighborhood, coming to school, paying attention, doing their homework, etc., etc., etc..

I was assigned to the school as an ‘above quota teacher’. I had no classroom assignment. “What?” I asked. “When do I get a classroom?” There were 10 or 15 or us who were in that category. (Probably all guys like me who had passed the exam by one point.) I was told that as openings came up we would be assigned. There were about 150 classroom teachers in this K-6 school.

We didn’t have to wait long. Teaching there was so stressful and difficult that teachers would quit and not come back the next day; a few walked out in the middle of the day.

Four years later I, too, left. I was no longer the kid with some unrealistic notions about how easy it would be to change things. Although still a kid in many ways, I at least had a clearer understanding of the complexity of what happens in a school. I saw how poverty and family life affect learning and above all how difficult it is for kids, who are pretty powerless in the system, to change things on their own.

A few years later, I was accepted into a School Psychology program and then after a few years working in the schools as a School Psychologist, I completed my doctorate and went into private practice working primarily with families and kids.